{"id":23317,"date":"2022-12-14T09:40:52","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T09:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/14\/voice-assistants-serve-their-makers-not-their-users-the-register\/"},"modified":"2022-12-14T09:40:52","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T09:40:52","slug":"voice-assistants-serve-their-makers-not-their-users-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/14\/voice-assistants-serve-their-makers-not-their-users-the-register\/","title":{"rendered":"Voice assistants serve their makers not their users \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Opinion<\/span> We were promised an age of wonders. By 2022 we’d have self-driving cars, robo-maids, even voice-activated “friends” \u2013 digital companions to keep us well-informed. What went wrong?<\/p>\n

We know that the physical world, filled with exceptions and one-off events, continuously confounds even the most able humans. Expecting more out of a piece of software seems \u2013 from 2022’s jaded point of view – a tragic example of believing your own hype. Robo-maids and self-driving vehicles fall over when they encounter the real world. Anything else would be either blind luck or black magic.<\/p>\n

We had every reason to expect better outcomes in the purely symbolic worlds of information, knowledge and communication. The big three personal voice assistants \u2013 Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri \u2013 have been with us for the better part of a decade, trained by billions (possibly trillions) of tiny interactions, each of them improving language models that must now be the equal of anything developed anywhere.<\/p>\n

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